Why Are American Colleges Obsessed With 'Leadership'?

Why Are American Colleges Obsessed With 'Leadership'?

longnt80/flickrEarlier
this month, more than 700,000 students submitted the Common Application
for college admissions. They sent along academic transcripts and SAT
scores, along with attestations of athletic or artistic success
and—largely uniform—bodies of evidence speaking to more
nebulously-defined characteristics: qualities like—to quote
the Harvard admissions website—“maturity, character, leadership,
self-confidence, warmth of personality, sense of humor, energy, concern
for others and grace under pressure.”
Why are American colleges so interested in leadership? On the Harvard
admissions website quoted above, leadership is listed third: just after
two more self-evident qualities. So too the Yale website, which quotes
former Yale president Kingman Brewer's assessment that “We have to make
the hunchy judgment as to whether or not with Yale’s help the candidate
is likely to be a leader in whatever he [or she] ends up doing.” Our
goals remain the same today” before going on to stress that “We are
looking for students we can help to become the leaders of their
generation in whatever they wish to pursue.”
The language of Princeton dean Janet Lavin Rapeleye in The New York Times is strikingly similar:
“We look for qualities that will help [students] become leaders in
their fields and in their communities.” (So too Princeton's admissions
website, which lists leadership prominently in its section on
extracurriculars: “We look for students who make a difference in their
schools and communities, so tell us about your leadership activities,
interests, special skills and other extracurricular involvements.”) In
his study The Gatekeepers, Jacques Steinberg describes how the
admissions officers at Wesleyan scored the “personal” section of an
applicant's portfolio: “A 9 [out of 9] at Wesleyan...someone 'sure to
“have significant impact on campus in leadership roles”; a 7 or 6 would
be assigned to someone who was “likely to be a leader in some areas,
contributor to many.”

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Applying to College Shouldn't Require Answering Life's Great QuestionsLeadership alone rarely makes or breaks an application, says
Emmi Harward, director of college counseling at The Bishop's School in
La Jolla, California and the Executive Director of the Association
College Counselors in Independent Schools. But, she says, “Not only does
leadership distinguish a student in a competitive applicant pool from
other students ([compare] a student body president to someone who has
spent four years just going home and doing their homework) but also
serves to foreshadow the impact the student could make on the
college/university campus, and the potential impact they could make once
they graduate.”
It's possible, of course, to understand “leadership,” as conceived in
the college admissions process, as a broad church of qualities:
encompassing a whole host of attributes desirable in bright, motivated
teenagers. But its rhetorical prevalence bears investigating. The tacit
assumption is that leadership, like “maturity” or “concern for others,”
needs no qualification or explanation; it is not only de facto desirable,
but indeed essential. To be a “contributor,” to use Wesleyan's
parlance, to a chess club is to be merely average; to be president of
that chess club, by contrast, is to display some intangible merit.
But such an assumption is hardly universal. To be a natural leader,
after all, (or even, to use Harvard's list of desirable qualities, a
“self-confident leader”), is to eschew other potential roles: that of a
“natural follower,” a “natural team player,” a “natural lone wolf.” And
each of these, in other cultural contexts, might be seen as equally, if
not more desirable. As Lan Liu, author of Beyond the American Model, puts it in a piece for the Harvard Business Review,
“Leadership is culture-specific. Unfortunately, this theme has been
unduly overshadowed by the bias, which is often an American one, toward
the pursuit of a universal model of leadership.”
Rather, there is something quintessentially American about the system
advocated by former Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University
Robert J. Sternberg in his book College Admissions for the 21st Century: a system in which“students
should be admitted to college on the basis of their potential for
future leadership and active citizenship, at whatever level of society.”
While Sternberg makes sure to tell us that he defines leadership “not
in the sense of achieving a level of authority, but rather as making a
positive, meaningful, and hopefully enduring difference to the world at
some level,” his assumption is that those worthy of admission at elite
colleges are not simply good scholars, or even good workers, but rather
those who will take initiative, those who will be pioneers in their
fields, those who will—implicitly—manage those others who are not.
It is no surprise that Sternberg's book often runs into the language
of business: he writes of how “talking to a high-level executive at a
major investment bank, I mentioned our desire to enhance admissions at
Tufts University. His response....was that tests like the SAT and the
ACT, as well as college grades, predicted quite well who would be good
analysts...What they did not predict as well was who would be able to
take the next step—who would have the capacity to envision where various
markets are going.” Sternberg then goes on to discuss his fund-raising
efforts, which involved meeting “some of the most successful alumni of
Tufts, as measured not only by their financial resources (and, hence,
giving capacity) but also by the contributions they have made to
society.” While Sternberg's caveats are doubtless made in good faith,
the parameters he sets up implicitly reward “leadership” as conceived,
quite straightforwardly, as managerial: artists and doctoral students in
the humanities, no matter how “successful” in their fields, do not tend
to congregate at fund-raising appeals.The implicit message behind the rhetoric of leadership is that learning for learning's sake is not enough.William Deresiewicz, in The American Scholar, may be too cynical when he writes,
“That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about
training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for themselves in
the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can
brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the
greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.”
But it's certainly true that the kind of qualities we think about when
we think about “leadership” do lend themselves naturally to hierarchical
ascent.
By contrast, at my English alma mater, Oxford, the ideal student is
not a leader but a lone wolf, something reinforced at every point in the
undergraduate process. Tuition takes the form of one-on-one “tutorials”
with professors. The admissions process consists of interview by
mock-tutorial with one's prospective future tutors, who also make
admissions decisions. Once on the course itself, students are assessed
entirely on their capacity for independent research. There are no
classroom grades but merely marks on end-of-course examinations,
anonymously graded. “Leadership”, and the qualities it is meant to
entail, hardly enters into the equation. What is valued is not the
contribution I make “to the world” at large, nor even the contribution I
make to the life of the campus or to my fellow students. Rather, it’s
the quality of the work I do on the course (which is to say, the level
of my marks) and, as I make my way towards a doctorate, the contribution
I make to my tiny, somewhat esoteric field.
Yet such insularity seems at odds with the rhetoric of the American
educational institution. To be a “lone wolf,” to simply “go home and do
their homework,” is to neglect, in some sense, a vital component of the
educational experience. Harward and Sternberg alike stress the
importance of “impact.” A desirable student is expected to do more than
merely learn effectively, to further the transmission of knowledge from
professor to student. They're expected to go further: to take an active
role in the classroom, as Harward notes, “contributing ideas that
sparked discussion or encouraging a quieter member of the class to offer
up their thoughts.”
It would be a stretch to accuse several of America's best educational
institutions of anti-intellectualism. But the implicit message behind
the rhetoric of leadership in the American college admissions is that
intellectualism alone is not enough, even for an academic institution.
Simply learning for learning's sake is not enough. In this paradigm,
there is something suspect—even selfish—about a “lone wolf” prospective
student that stores up knowledge, like a dragon hoarding treasure. For
all that is made of the American tradition of “rugged individualism,”
American culture is less welcoming to those who neither lead nor follow
but simply opt out altogether.

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How Getting Into College Became Such a Long, Frenzied, Competitive ProcessThere is much to be said for the benefits of valuing this
kind of leadership among students. A case can be made that the
pure-academics approach of many continental and European universities,
which encourages and rewards independence, also fosters a degree of
isolation. Students are not encouraged, at any institutional level to
collaborate, to gain managerial skills, to learn to follow or lead. And
the valuation and fostering of leadership can be especially vital for
groups of people who have not historically had the opportunity so to do –
many women's colleges, for example, highlight the value of seeing women
in leadership positions on campus.
But it's worth investigating the assumption that to be a “good
leader” and to be a “desirable student” are the same thing. In
valorizing “leadership” as a quality, we risk overlooking other—less
obvious—qualities, something Harward concedes could use more discussion.
“We do need good followers, and I think that aspect of leadership is
something that we should talk about more,” she says. “What good is any
leader if they alienate those around them or don't empower them to lead
themselves? And does the focus on leadership imply that a student who
embraces the life of the mind and a specific intellectual interest to
the fullest isn't leading in some equally compelling way?” Certainly,
it's worth asking if assumptions about “leadership,” culturally-specific
and quintessentially American as they are, penalize candidates from
different cultural backgrounds, where leadership—particularly among
adolescents—might take different forms, or be discouraged altogether.
College admissions has come a long way in recognizing how candidates
from different backgrounds and different levels of opportunity might
present themselves differently. At its best, the holistic admissions
process allows admissions officers to assess test scores and grades in
context. But so too it’s worth looking at the context of the personal
qualities admissions officers value. Do we need a graduating class full
of leaders? Or should schools actively seek out diversity in
interpersonal approaches—as they do in everything else?